In response to this post which I made the other day, talking about the general class tree, I made some additional changes to individual talents + the layout. These are essentially my suggestions for what changes I’d like to see for the class tree. The purpose of these suggestions is to, hopefully, work towards improving our lack of survivability in certain scenarios, and how we are currently also lacking options for particular group-based utility. Feedback is always appreciated!
As usual, I’ll post a link to pastebin, where anyone who wants to can copy the code in said link and import it into TalentTreeManager(TTM), in case they want to check things out in a talent calculator interface. I’ll also list all changes to individual talents below here, along with an updated image to compare to the layout of the current class tree we have on live.
Wilderness Medicine - Changed to a 1 point talent, effect is the same as it was prev at 2 points.
Natural Mending - Changed to a 1 point talent, effect has been adjusted slightly.
Second bracket
(New) Snake Trap - New talent added. Similar to the old version, before it was removed from the class.
Improved Traps - Talent changed to a 1 point talent, and has been renamed to Trap Mastery. The talent now provides further enhancements, in addition to what ImprTraps used to provide at 2 points.
(New) Iron Hawk/Aspect of the Fox - New choice node added, bringing back some old talents/abilities. Some minor changes have been made to each one, compared to what they used to do.
(New) Serpent Venom - New talent added. If chosen, allows players to alter the effects of Snake Trap, making for potential choices based on preferences.
Pathfinding - Talent changed to a 1 point talent. Effect changed to providing 8% passive movement speed, if chosen.
(New) Cold Trigger - New talent added. Allows players to modify Freezing Trap, to potentially serve a different purpose(NOT damage), in cases where crowd control might not be as much of a priority.
Born to be Wild - Effect slightly changed. Now provides a 25% CDR at 2 points, up from 20%.
Tranquilizing Shot - Talent has now absorbed the effect of another talent; Improved Tranquilizing Shot.
Improved Tranquilizing Shot - Talent has been removed.
Binding Shackles - Talent has been removed.
Hunter’s Avoidance - Talent has been changed, now also provides additional benefits if the hunter has lost a lot of health to AoE attacks.
Sentinel’s Protection - Talent has been changed, now provides additional benefits to party members who take direct damage, while the Sentinel Owl is active. The Leech-effect is still there.
Third bracket
Nothing changed, since it’s focusing on throughput and not utility/defensives.
Tooltips for new/modified talents - *Numbers are subject to change*
Wilderness Medicine
Mend Pet heals for an additional 50% of your pet’s health over its duration, and has a 50% chance to dispel a magic effect each time it heals your pet.
Natural Mending
Every 15 Focus you spend reduces the remaining cooldown on Exhilaration by 1.0 sec.
Snake Trap
Hurls a snake trap to the target location. If an enemy sets off the trap, several venomous snakes are released. The snakes will pursue the approaching enemy, dealing instant physical damage and poisoning the target with each successful attack. The snakes will stay for a total of 10 sec.
Trap Mastery
The cooldown of all your traps is reduced by 5 sec.
Provides enhancements to certain traps, if chosen.
-Freezing Trap - When an enemy is released from the ice, their movement speed is reduced by % for X sec.
-Tar Trap - Increases the radius of the tar patch left by Tar Trap by 5 yards. Enemies caught in the tar will have their movement speed reduced by another 10%, increasing the longer they remain in the tar, up to a max increase of 30%.
Iron Hawk/Aspect of the Fox
-Iron Hawk - Reduces all damage you take while standing still by 10%, and by 5% while moving.
-Aspect of the Fox - 2 minute cooldown.
Party and raid members within 60 yards take on the aspects of a fox, allowing them to move while casting all spells and abilities for 6 sec.
This ability has a shared cooldown with other Aspect of the Fox abilities in your party or raid of 45 sec.
Serpent Venom
Swap out the type of venomous snakes used for your snake trap, allowing for different effects to be used against enemies. Each effect has a duration of 5 sec, refreshed by each successful attack from one of the snakes.
-Paralytic Venom - Afflicted targets have their movement, casting, and attack speed slowed, increasing in effect the more they move, and with each successful attack by a snake.
-Hemotoxic Venom - Afflicted targets have their healing done & received reduced, increasing in effect with each successful attack by a snake.
-Necrotic Venom - Afflicted targets suffer additional Nature damage, and take increased damage from all incoming sources for the duration of the effect. Periodic Nature damage dealt increases with each successful attack by a snake.
Pathfinding
Movement speed increased by 8%.
Cold Trigger
Freezing Trap can be triggered manually by the hunter, causing the trap to form a solid block of ice that the hunter and other party/raid members can stand behind to protect themselves from incoming attacks for X sec.
In order to manually trigger the trap, the hunter needs to be in close proximity to where the armed trap has been placed.
Born To Be Wild
Reduces the cooldowns of
Survival
Aspect of the Eagle
Aspect of the Cheetah, Survival of the Fittest, and Aspect of the Turtle by 25%.
Tranquilizing Shot
Removes 1 Enrage and 1 Magic effect from an enemy target.
Successfully dispelling an effect generates 10 Focus.
Hunter’s Avoidance
Damage taken from area of effect attacks reduced by 6%.
The hunter adapts to incoming damage from area of effect attacks. If more than 25% of the hunters health has been lost to damage taken from area of effect attacks, the hunter gains Adaptation.
Adaptation - The hunter takes 12% reduced damage of the same type as the spell that triggered the effect.
Sentinel’s Protection
While the Sentinel Owl is active, your party gains 5% Leech.
If you, or anyone in your party takes damage from a direct hit while Sentinel Owl is active, the Sentinel will grant that player a protective ward which absorbs damage based on the total duration of the Sentinel Owl.
I won’t comment on all the details of your suggestions, I like a lot of it, my main concern with the tree you’re showing is that it doesn’t solve the issue of talents requiring a pet which goes against Marksman trying to play without a pet because of Lone Wolf.
Hunter is already amongst the lowest amount of talent nodes in their base tree but, for Marksman, it’s even worse because of Lone Wolf rendering 6 talents 100% unusable.
Either we need to lose Lone Wolf and the pet talents needs to be changed to actually have a use for Marksman or the pet talents need to be moved to BM and Survival trees.
I fully appreciate your concerns regarding pet-focused talents, and how, from an end-game perspective(and how it reduces the number of choices one can potentially make), they’re not really useful to MM hunters. I can only assume that the reason for why the devs added them, those specific ones, is because of their philosophy of designing the class/tree for the game as a whole. Meaning, they want MM hunters to have the option to focus more on pet damage as well, in case certain players want that, depending on what they’re doing. Can’t say for sure, but that’s my guess.
Another angle would also be how it made it easier for them to start the class tree off, with Kill Command in there, as both Beast Mastery and Survival rely on that ability as a core part of their toolkit.
I would argue that the class tree shouldn’t focus specifically on Kill Command as an ability, either the ability itself, or anything that improves it somehow. If you ask me, if anything, I’d argue that a bestial-oriented talent to include in the class tree should be ‘A Murder of Crows’, since it has more or less always been a class-wide option for all specs, prior to Dragonflight. I can understand that they might be hesitant to add something like ‘A Murder of Crows’ as a potential starting talent in the class tree though.
As for AMoC’s role within the BM tree, I’d argue it should focus mostly on ways to improve/enhance the ability, through interactions with other abilities.
Duration extends
Potential for adding AoE functionality
Plain increases to damage.
…to name a few examples.
Anyway, I did not change/remove the pet damage talents for a few reasons. (1) What I said above about how they want a core feature of the class to be about having options to focus on your main pet, even as MM. (2) The primary focus of my suggestions above was about improving our utility/defensive capabilities. I did not approach the tree with anything involving throughput in mind.
Great post and read the “let’s talk hunter” post too, equally well put together. I don’t PvP but I think removing double tap for both pvp and pve is a bit strange to me. Double tap’s second aimed shot in pvp is already at 50%, so why not just reduce the damage further to like 35%, so goes with rapid fire.
In terms of the talent trees for MM, I believe this is an issue with where the class fantasy and game play/tuning conflicts. Hunter was originally to be played with a pet regardless of the spec. However, I can’t remmeber when but MM slowly became a lone wolf spec, which is fine and I enjoy it a lot more than with a pet tbh. If this is the way blizz is going with MM then I fully support it but I feel tho they need to remove pet related talents, BUT that will probably end up making MM unable to lust which devalues the class a bit.
I love hunter class and been maining it on and off for quite a few expansions (starting from TBC), but yeah i feel like there is a big conflict between class fantasy and tuning/gameplay. Hope they can fix soon tho.
that’s just M+ man, I’m sitting at almost 2800 io on my rogue and still get no instant invite. It isn’t really based on class but rather the # of applicants and how many of your same class applied to that group.
My very first character in WoW over 14 years ago was a hunter. I am not having fun with her this expansion. Far more enjoyable playing a melee class. I keep trying to find something to keep me playing her but between the squishiness, poor pet aggro, losing pet aggro constantly, pet aggro cooldown way too long, etc. it just sucks really. Pull a mob with pet, turn around facing the other way until the taunt comes off cooldown, turn around hit taunt again then start attacking. All in an attempt to try and avoid pulling any other mob off my pet. It happens. Virtually every dam time. My melee can pull multiple mobs at once, tank double that, hunter? Nope. Single target at a time. Not fun and soooo slow.
The damage reduction you’d get from that talent has been included in other talents. Ex. Iron Hawk. Albeit it doesn’t require you to trap/stun/root/knock the target away, although, that wouldn’t be a bad change, would it?
I agree that the design is not ideal. Though, the talent in question is easy to avoid, and it certainly has its use in various areas of the game. Since they design the tree with the whole game in mind, and accounting for what I said just above this, I don’t see Trailblazer as a major issue.
If anything, if players feel that we as hunters, even with the changes I proposed in mind, are lacking in this area, I’d argue that they should adjust the passive movement speed granted by the Pathfinder talent instead. I changed it to 8% for 1 point total, but you could make that 10, or even 12%.
While it is fine to have better and worse talents, trailblazer (for 2 points mind you) only exactly helps with legacy indoor content and running back after dying in M+ (don’t release let them rez you its always faster/ if everybody died you need to wait for the slowest player anyway). Maybe people pick it in PvP (I don’t play PvP in WoW but I can’t even see any use for it even in PvP).
It is so bad in fact it would be fine baseline and nobody would care. I doubt anybody would notice its removal either.
I know it isn’t the end of the world and you never need it for pathing. All I say is it is really bad, never pickable as it is a tiny QoL improvement for niche situations and the audacity of it being a 2 pointer adds insult to injury how little care went into hunter.
It’s not very useful for e.g. content, no. This is true. Having said that, it has value in any areas where you can’t use a mount. For players that mostly do open world content/exploration/collecting, or older dungeons etc. they might find themselves in caves, or larger buildings. I’m not saying that it would be crucial for them to have, but it does have its use.
Having a talent like that, for those who do focus mostly on e.g. content, it’s probably not for them to pick. IMO, that’s perfectly fine.
Sure, we can find an excuse for everything instead of saying this is at best a baseline passive.
By that logic Owl is incredible. I mean imagine I ever have to shoot through an obstacle. Who else can do that?
I can even provide it for the entire group. Hunter group utility is insane!
I don’t mean to be condescending so if that is what you get from this I am sorry. I just don’t understand how anybody can defend it as a 2 point talent. It’s so far off.
Owl looks good in comparison and Owl looks and is extremely bad.
I solo as MM+pet and I don’t pull aggro on the primary target, ever. I don’t pull aggro on secondary targets, ever, provided I misdirect to the pet on cooldown.
This is exactly the wrong way to use a taunt spell.
When a taunt is used, the taunting entity moves to the top of the threat listed for the taunted enemy, then generates some base threat over and above that. If you go ham and generate 100k threat in the first global on the enemy, Growl will generate something like 110k threat. Further, you need to sit at 130% of pet threat to pull aggro, since you are at range.
Good thing Ghorak has it as 1 point and permanent uptime in his talent build and nobody is defending the current implementation at 2 points then.
As an only casual hunter and someone who really loves the idea of Marks being that long range, high damage, but maybe low survivability sniper archetype (a glass cannon) and warlock main the additions/suggestions to add conditional abilities to pet based talents like our Grimore of Sacrifice considerations is really important. They dont have to be as survival focus as ours and could be more damage focused, but that utility should at least remain.
Giving Lone Wolf a stun like Intimidation is crucial. Call it Blunt Shot or whatever.
Decoupling that from explosive is 100% needed too. That or trade it with a binding or scatter shot. Could go scatter into explosive if you still really wanted to.
Black Arrow could use a bit of a utility buff too and actually silence players. The fact that its a 2 sec hard cast on a 1min CD is an already plenty strong drawback for a silence effect. Especially given Strangulate is instant on that same 1min CD
I like your emphasis on defensives. Hunter right now in every single piece of content are just flopping over. From Mythic+ to Arena Hunter just dies because our defensives are paper and on MASSIVE cooldowns. Damage is def falling further and further behind every other class and I don’t think a measly 5% buff will change that. Blizzard tuned Hunter damage around some extremely rare drop bow which was the dumbest thing they could of ever done.
But regardless I think they can go one of two ways on improving our survivability. Giving us more ways to kite melee (2nd charge of disengage, when you disengage you root the target and drop a tar trap etc). Or we could go the route of flat out giving us new lower cooldown defensive abilities to sustain us in PvE or PvP. I think the second option is good, but I also think maybe a combination of both will still be necessary in PvP.
This would absolutely make trapping easier lol. Trapping is so useless in Shuffle though since DPS teammates just spin to win it and break it every time.
Owl has the potential to be very good in niche scenarios, yes. Though, not everywhere ofc.
My issue with Owl is that it was added as a choice of utility for the class when hunters were screaming for useful group-wide utility options to be added that would be good in instanced PvE as well. I’m not saying that Owl is perfect. For example, I do think Sentinel’s Protection, its default design of solely granting the party 5% leech, is horrendously bad. Again, I’m no expert on PvP, but I doubt anyone would want to pick that option.
This is why I decided to add another element to this particular talent, to make it a more attractive choice for a pick.
“Far off”, based on what? If you’re talking about combat based gameplay, I doubt they even consider the talent to be intended for that. At least not for a primary purpose.
Don’t get me wrong, I would have nothing against them making it a 1 point-talent.
Again, if you want options for us to gain higher passive movement speed, I’d argue that the Pathfinder talent should be buffed/have it’s effect increased further.
Hmm, not sure which talent you’re referring to @Adreaver. I think Ansim is still talking about Trailblazer there.
Its fine really.
Not everything has to be for combat.
But even the talents it competes with outshine it in any scenario.
I guess I never got over losing Aspect of the Cheetah passive and Aspect of the Pack. Hunter would really lend itself for a Stampeding Roar type of ability
Anyway your suggestion are reasonable overall and the tree can contain stuff that isn’t for me.
